Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams: What It Is and How It Works

A book Freud ties to his father’s death

In the preface to the third edition of «The Interpretation of Dreams» Freud speaks of the book as something he wrote in 1899, and offers it as part of a self-analysis that began in reaction to his father’s death. That loss, he writes, is the gravest in a man’s life. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy places the publication after a long stretch of self-analysis and treats the volume as Freud’s major work, written in the years when the birth of psychoanalysis was taking shape. The theoretical frame and the dream book grew together, which is why the volume reads as a treatise and as a disguised autobiography at once.

The Freud Museum London ranks it among the twentieth century’s most important books. It also credits the book with something less obvious, the start of a literary genre that tells a life through the dreams of the person who lived it.

1899 or 1900, and why two dates circulate

Students meet both figures and suspect a mistake. The two years in fact cover two moments of the same book. 1899 is the year Freud has in mind when he recalls writing it, in the preface to the third edition. 1900 is the year the Freud Museum London and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy give for the first publication, which is why that figure turns up most often.

In an exam either answer works, provided you say what each one dates. “Written in 1899, published in 1900” is a sharper answer than either year on its own.

Manifest content and latent content

The Freud Museum London defines manifest content as the dream as we remember it. The latent content is instead the underlying dream-thoughts out of which that dream is built, and the wishes living in them reach the waking account in disguise. A straightforward formula helps hold them apart: manifest is what you tell, latent is what you look for.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums up the same pair in other words: on one side how a dream looks on the surface, on the other the repressed unconscious wishes the encyclopedia treats as its real target.

Practical example: you wake up and remember missing a train. That account is the manifest layer. For Freud it is a finished product, the outcome of a construction, and the wishes that set the construction going appear in it disguised.

The dream-work, and the interpretation that undoes it

The Freud Museum London page on the dream-work credits Freud with the idea that a dream is a particular form of thinking, produced by that work. Interpreting a dream then consists in undoing what the dream-work has built, travelling in the opposite direction from the dream itself.

The museum also defines two of the mechanisms behind the construction. In condensation several dream elements merge into one, whether themes, images, figures or ideas. In displacement importance changes place, passing from an element of the latent content to a marginal element of the manifest one, and in the other direction a detail that looks insignificant can end up in the foreground.

The same museum quotes a line of Freud’s that shows where he was looking. By his own account the theory stands on what the work of interpretation uncovers behind a dream, and not on the dream as it is remembered. The waking account only supplies the material to start from.

Dream symbols, and why no dictionary follows

In bookshops the volumes that promise the meaning of every object dreamed of often carry Freud’s name on the cover, and they stand on the far side of the line just quoted. A list of fixed meanings would stop at the waking account, the level Freud declared he was setting aside, and a symbol that always means the same thing would make the work of interpretation pointless.

There is also a difference of standing here with respect to empirical research. Anyone coming to psychological science runs straight into procedures built to be checked by other people, and research methods in psychology lists the tools used to do the checking.

Scientific standing in dispute, and Popper’s criterion

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains why one current in the philosophy of science has disputed the scientific standing of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams, and it does so by raising Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability. On that formulation a scientific theory has to clash with some possible observation; one that fits whatever happens is left outside.

That objection is about the shape of the theory, and it did nothing to limit the book’s reach. Across the same century psychoanalysis was moving into novels, and readers can find it gently mocked in Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, where a patient writes his own story for the doctor treating him.